Self-commentary is never the literary genre of transparency. Despite numerous reworkings and corrections – among the well-known, for example, is the status of madness between Folie et déraison and the early 1970s lecture courses – Michel Foucault tried to restore a particularly unitary profile to his conceptual itinerary at the end of his life. This unity is first of all thematic:

I would like to say, first of all, what has been the goal of my work during the last twenty years. It has not been to analyze the phenomena of power, nor to elaborate the foundations of such an analysis. My objective, instead, has been to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects.

This is an autobiographical reflection that throws itself into a relation between the moments of one's own intellectual work or the type of temporal scanning, and the postulation of a complementarity always-already inscribed within them.

In that sense, this criticism is not transcendental, and its goal is not that of making a metaphysics possible: it is genealogical in its design and archaeological in its method. Archeological— and not transcendental— in the sense that it will not seek to identify the universal structures of all knowledge or of all possible moral action, but will seek to treat the instances of discourse that articulate what we think, say, and do as so many historical events. And this critique will be genealogical in the sense that it will not deduce from the form of what we are what it impossible for us to do and to know; but it will separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think.